Slashdot Mirror
nForce MCP Network Driver Working On FreeBSD 5.1
Dan writes "Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test."
It's not emulation, it's binary compatibility. When a Linux binary is loaded, the kernel loads the Linux system call map and uses that instead of the FreeBSD on. IOW, the binary is running natively, without any emulation layer.
In the early days of FreeBSD 4.x, you could actually run Linux binaries faster on FreeBSD, and in many cases, it would run stabler too. (This is why the CGI in The Matrix was done using Linux apps on FreeBSD servers.)
But, this only works for userland apps. You can't run Linux kernel modules (drivers) inside the FreeBSD kernel.
I've never used *BSD, but all the propoganda I've read says that it has a built in Linux emulator. Wouldn't that make it easy to port?
It's a driver, and drivers live in kernelspace. The FreeBSD kernel (and others) can only appear to be 'linux' to the userland, and not to stuff that lives inside the kernel.Yes, he is simply porting the open source wrapper for the Linux binary module to the BSD kernel, as he mentions in the article. Reverse engineering the supplied binary module is prohibited by the license under which it is supplied.
At this point, we have no idea what chip is used in the NForce2 ethernet. Possible suspects such as AMD8111e and pcnet32 have been tried without success.
I assume that Nvidia has some kind of licensing agreement that prevents them from releasing specs; otherwise, why in the world would you guard the specs for a damn ethernet card?
Genebrew